The IoT Market in 2018: Top 5 Trends & Predictions

15 December 2017

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The Internet of Things (IoT) market has come a long way and matured considerably over the past year. It’s a great achievement because businesses were just starting to learn about this technology and speculating about its benefits just two years ago.

In 2016, enterprises really started to understand the benefits of IoT and this year IoT scaled without the knowledge of most of the workforce. According to Forester Research, this technology will essentially provide the foundation to build future customer value.

As a result, in 2018, we will probably see IoT move to the edge and grow more prominent along with specialized IoT platforms. While security will continue to be a major concern across industries, it’s not expected to impact IoT adoption.

To get a sense of what’s really in store for the IoT market in 2018, let’s take a look at the top five trends and predictions for the new year.

1. New European Guidelines Will Drive the Commercialization of IoT Data

According to Forester, about 45% of US-based enterprises that make decisions based on data and analytics are already commercializing their data. But across the pond, the numbers are much lower with only 38% of German companies and 35% of French enterprises currently doing the same.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) slowed things down in this space in 2017, but the European data economy directive is now expected to promote the exchange of data and insights.

2. The Deployment of Edge Solutions Will Be Accelerated by Key Use Cases

Business processes supported by IoT mostly occur in the cloud or in on-premises data centers. But that’s about to change as businesses demand the deployment of business processes requiring local data analysis close to the source that enables these processes.

These smart devices on the edge can act locally based on the data that they generate and only leverage the cloud for the following:

Configuration

Deployment

Management

Scalability

Security

For the most part, the impact of IoT on businesses will depend on the insights that can be derived from analytics and the business outcomes that can be achieved. These outcomes can be divided into three categories with each one having their own set of use cases:

Blockchain-based IoT adoption is predicted to rise to 5%, but it’s far from ready for large-scale deployments. This is because we still haven’t come up with the right formula that can ensure seamless integration (with the existing technology), reliability, and stability.

4. Healthcare IoT Will Be a Huge Target for Attacks in 2018

According to Kaspersky Lab, the healthcare industry will be significantly vulnerable to attacks in the new year. As the industry strives to get better connected by incorporating more smart devices into their infrastructure, they will also need to find innovative ways to keep it protected.

These attacks are expected to target medical equipment for extortion and malicious disruption. There will also be more attacks focused on stealing patient data.

The WannaCry ransomware attack showed us how easy it was to bring the industry down to its knees, so it’s quite disconcerting to expect more of the same in 2018.

According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, LTE will be a dominant force in all IoT deployments, reaching 5.5 billion subscriptions by the end of 2023. So it’s safe to conclude that IoT implementations in the new year will be increasingly LTE-based and 2018 will be the year that Cat-M1 gets to scale.

At Intersog, we have extensive experience in enterprise IoT deployments. To learn more, click HERE to connect with one of our in-house experts.

Andrew is our IT storyteller and copywriter. His current undertaking is big data analytics and CSS as well as digital design and branding.
He is a contributor to various publications with a focus on new technology and marketing.

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